


When 'Baby A' Grew Up: Soho

by seekeronthepath



Series: When 'Baby A' Grew Up [2]
Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Agender Aziraphale, Gen, Genderqueer Crowley (Good Omens), Genderqueer Warlock Dowling, Nanny Crowley (Good Omens), when Warlock grows up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-08
Updated: 2020-02-19
Packaged: 2020-08-11 21:50:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20160649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekeronthepath/pseuds/seekeronthepath
Summary: Now that he's reunited with Crowley and Aziraphale, Warlock starts figuring out who HE is. Who they are? Something like that, anyway.





	1. Chapter 1

On the first day of Warlock Dowling’s gap year, he acquired an excellent shapeless indeterminate grey poncho-turtleneck hybrid, had dinner at a rather nice restaurant in Soho, and discovered that his childhood nanny was the Serpent of Eden and had been assigned to his care because Hell had mistakenly believed he was the Antichrist.[1]

[1] There were various other details, including the reassuring news that the _actual_ Antichrist had decided not to end the world after all, but these are the most pertinent points.

On the second day of Warlock's gap year, he slept in, came downstairs to find the bookshop was (at least nominally) open for business, and promptly got collected by Crowley to go out for breakfast. 

“The bookshop has a room for making tea and cocoa in, not a kitchen,” Crowley commented, as he drove at terrifying speeds through the busy streets of London. “If you stay with us for long, it’ll turn  _ into _ a kitchen, but I was going to take you out today anyway. We might as well start with breakfast.”

The Bentley pulled to an abrupt stop in a spot that Warlock was  _ sure _ must be illegal[2], and Warlock followed, a bit bewildered, as Crowley sauntered into a busy cafe. “Where were you planning to take me out?” he asked.

[2] He was correct.

Crowley shrugged. “Wherever you like,” he said, sprawling in a chair at a conveniently empty. “Museums, parks, clothes shopping…” He gave Warlock a meaningful look over the top of his sunglasses.

“Clothes shopping?” Warlock asked, fiddling with the hem of his shapeless indeterminate grey thing. “Why?”

Crowley raised his eyebrows, passing Warlock a menu that happened to be conveniently next to his hand. “Because you obviously like that grey number better than any of your other clothing, but it’s almost August, and that’s mostly wool. I have no trouble with you wearing whatever you please, so long as it’s appropriate for your activities and the weather. And that isn’t.”

Warlock ducked his head at the familiar tone. “Yes, Nanny.”

\-----

The first attempt at clothes shopping, in the Camden Markets, didn’t go very well. There were lots of summer clothes there, including some that Warlock couldn’t look at for very long but kept glancing at anyway, but he felt so  _ exposed _ . Even with Crowley right there, there were  _ people _ all over the place. People who might see him, and think...something. Warlock wasn’t sure what they would think, but he was sure he didn’t like it. 

Crowley wandered along beside him for about ten minutes as Warlock got more and more tense, then took a sharp turn and led Warlock over to the canal. “Here,” he said. “Look at the ducks for a bit.” A few minutes later, he came back with a small paper shopping bag hanging from his hand. “Right. Are you going to be more comfortable talking outdoors, in the car, or back at the shop?”

“Sorry,” Warlock muttered, his shoulders hunched. “I was just…”

Crowley looked at him over her glasses. “Warlock,” she said kindly, “I didn’t say you were in trouble. I asked where you would be most comfortable to talk. Let’s go back to the car and you can tell me what’s troubling you.”

The problem was that Warlock didn’t  _ know _ what was troubling him. He sat in the passenger seat of the Bentley, his feet up on the seat so he could wrap his arms around his knees[3], and completely failed to put it into words.

[3] Crowley would not have put up with this behaviour from almost anyone, but if not sitting properly helped Warlock cope, he was willing to accept a little dirt on the seat. Once.

Luckily, Nanny didn’t really  _ need _ words to work things like this out. Warlock used to think it was magic; maybe it actually was.[4] But however she figured out, after a few minutes of sitting in silence, she said, “Was it the clothes that scared you, or the people?”

[4] It wasn’t. Six thousand years of manipulating humans gave you a very good eye for body language.

Warlock shrugged mutely, feeling like everything he could say had turned into a big tangled lump in his throat.

Nanny gave him an evaluating look. “I’ve been known to...go a little quickly for some people,” she said quietly. “You really do need summer clothes you’ll actually wear, but that doesn’t mean you have to buy them today. And when you have bought them, you don’t have to throw away your old things and never wear them again. You get to choose when to do things, my dear.”

Warlock nodded, hiding his face in his knees. The sun coming in the window was bright, and it was making his eyes water. And he didn’t have cool sunglasses like Nanny, so he could be forgiven for hiding his face.

“Hmm.” The paper shopping bag brushed against Warlock’s hand. “Here.”

Taking it automatically, Warlock looked inside and saw...fabric? It was a mix of soft purple and green, soft and smooth, and when he pulled it out and unbundled it, the fabric turned out to be a large, lightweight silk scarf. “What…?” he breathed.

Crowley shrugged, looking out the window in front of him. “ ‘s ambiguous,” he said lightly. “Lots of ways to wear it. Easy to add to another outfit. Easy to shove it in a pocket if you change your mind halfway through the day.”

Warlock blinked, the fabric like cool water on his skin. This had to be expensive, surely. “...you bought this for me?”

“Yup.” Crowley shrugged again. “Told the cashier I owed my godchild a birthday present.”[5]

[5] In fact, Crowley had not told the cashier anything. He was not in the habit of explaining himself. 

Forcing his hands to unclench so he didn’t tear the silk, Warlock blinked hard and wrapped the scarf loosely around his neck. (It didn’t go very well with his shapeless indeterminate grey thing, but right now he didn’t care.) “Thank you,” he mumbled, wishing he had something cleverer to say. “It’s...really great.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's a sequel! A few notes from me:
> 
> 1\. This is (hopefully) the second in a set of sequels which are gradually going to cover a whole range of things  
2\. The focus of this fic is on Warlock exploring his gender identity. I'm cis, so if anyone has any suggestions to make, or pet peeves, or common experiences they'd love to see Warlock have, feel free to tell me about them, and if I mess something up, PLEASE tell me about it  
3\. Warlock is super inconsistent with Crowley's pronouns and that's on purpose. In general, Warlock thinks of Crowley as she/Nanny when he's feeling child-like and taken care of, and he thinks of Crowley as he/Crowley when he's relating to Crowley more as an adult. In the previous fic, Crowley made it clear that he doesn't mind what name or pronouns Warlock uses  
4\. Aziraphale and Crowley have an established Understanding by this point, but it's not going to be front and centre in this fic


	2. Chapter 2

Returning to the bookshop was a relief. It  _ felt _ like Nanny and Brother Francis somehow, probably because of some magic thing, and the back room was cosy. Like being in your own room, where it didn’t matter what you looked like because it was yours. Tentative but intrigued, Warlock perused the shelves and stacks of books, his nose an inch from their spines as he decoded their titles, but his hands locked firmly behind his back. 

“Would you like something to read, dear boy?” Aziraphale asked, startling him.

Warlock spun to face him, eyes wide. “Oh, I - I don’t want to damage them,” he stuttered. “They look - fragile? Well. Not fragile. But...damageable.”

Aziraphale beamed at him. “That’s very thoughtful of you, Warlock, and I will certainly teach you how to take care of them before you pick anything out, but books are meant to be read. It would be a terrible shame if these authors’ words never inspired anyone new because their books were never opened.”[1]

[1] A regular visitor to the bookshop would probably have suspected an imposter at this point, but a regular visitor to the bookshop a) did not have the advantage of being Aziraphale’s more-or-less godson, and b) had the disadvantage of being suspected of the dastardly intention of taking books _away_ with them.

What followed was a cheerful, rambling lecture about handling books, storing books, paper-making, ink-making, the terrible lighting in manuscriptoriums, incunabula, ‘that lovely fellow Johannes’, alphabets, cunieform, the Library of Alexandria, and the surprising longevity of Latin.

“I studied Latin at school, actually,” Warlock said shyly, and Aziraphale beamed again.

“How wonderful! What texts did you study?”

Warlock shrugged. “We did Vergil and Caesar mostly, and then we did Martial’s epigrams and Cicero’s speeches.”

“Cicero?” Crowley, who’d been off doing...something, came through the doorway to the rest of the shop and leaned against a pillar. “You, a humble student, a speaker of English, a language which has a most lamentable lack of connection to Latin, being an unholy mix of languages spoken by Northern Europeans, blended with the Norse, and then overlaid by that descendant of Latin, Norman French, and then shaken up for a few hundred years before importing additional Latin words for the purpose of sounding important, who studied Latin for the purpose of understanding the many great works in that language, and the many works which are not great, but nevertheless interesting, with the speeches of Marcus Tullius Cicero, senator and consul of Rome, manipulator of clauses and despoiler of sentence structure, were afflicted?” [2]

[2] To those who have studied Cicero, this will be an unpleasant reminder of his oratory style, which for some reason has been held up for centuries as an example of exemplary Latin rhetoric. Crowley really regretted that one.

Warlock laughed - and  _ Aziraphale _ laughed too, which Warlock thought he probably didn’t do very often.

“It’s your own fault, my dear,” Aziraphale said once he’d caught his breath, striding over and giving Crowley a delicate kiss on the cheek. “You  _ would _ keep talking him up to people.”

Crowley looked like someone trying very hard to look completely unaffected, but he was blushing. “Yes, well, the point  _ is _ , Cicero’s awful. Give him some Plautus. Or Catullus, maybe.”

“I am  _ not _ showing him Catullus,” Aziraphale said firmly. “Ovid’s  _ Metamorphoses _ ?”

Crowley rolled his eyes. “Oh yeah, Ovid’s great - all the men think with their dicks and all the women are either victimised or vengeful. At least Catullus is  _ cheerfully _ crude.”

“ ‘Crude’ is putting it lightly,” Aziraphale muttered. “But I do take your point about Ovid.” He hummed, going over to a shelf and picking out a slim leather volume, before carrying it to his desk and starting to mark certain pages with clean strips of paper. “I’ll mark some of the nice ones.”

“You’re not going to show him the one about the guy whose body odour was as bad as a goat? Or what’s-his-face, who kept putting H’s on everything?”

“One thing at a time,” Aziraphale said firmly. “Now then, Warlock, this was a student copy, so it’s got quite a gloss, but I assume you’ll need a dictionary?”

Warlock blinked. He did  _ like _ Latin translation (he’d started taking Latin because of childhood memories, and to spite his dad, but he’d found that there was something very satisfying in the logic puzzle of word endings and parts of speech), but he hadn’t thought about looking for something to translate for fun now that his exams were over. “Yes please,” he replied. “And a notebook?”

When Aziraphale handed it over (along with a plump dictionary and a moleskine notebook), Crowley winked, and a few red silk ribbons joined the slips of paper. “Have fun,” he said smugly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A shorter chapter this time, mainly because Warlock needed a moment to relax after the last one. Cicero really does love cramming in clauses like that; Ovid's Metamorphoses really are quite uncomfortable from any sort of feminist perspective; and Catullus really is VERY crude. Not always, but a lot of the time. On the other hand, he's also accessible, good-natured about it, and he's fun to read. Aziraphale would not admit to enjoying most of Catullus' poetry, but he does have a certain fondness for Catullus 5:
> 
> Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love,  
and let us judge all the rumors of the old men  
to be worth just one penny!  
The suns are able to fall and rise:  
When that brief light has fallen for us,  
we must sleep a never ending night.  
Give me a thousand kisses, then another hundred,  
then another thousand, then a second hundred,  
then yet another thousand more, then another hundred.  
Then, when we have made many thousands,  
we will mix them all up so that we don't know,  
and so that no one can be jealous of us when he finds out  
how many kisses we have shared.
> 
> (Translation from http://rudy.negenborn.net/catullus/text2/e5.htm - a website which has translations of all of his poetry if you're curious)


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warlock, Crowley, and Aziraphale have a chat about gender and some of the ways it gets complicated

Over the next week or so, Warlock settled in. Breakfast foods appeared in the bookshop’s kitchenette, and he got himself an Oyster card so he could get around on his own. Most days he found museums to visit, or galleries, or markets, then had lunch in a park (a baked potato, or a sandwich from Pret, or something else cheap) and imagined backstories for the people he saw there. In the afternoons he wandered, going wherever looked interesting, pocketing flyers for shows and classes and walking tours that he wasn’t game to get tickets for yet. (Sometimes, his walks took him to charity shops, where he spent a few minutes at a time looking through clothes that made him nervous before heading over to the book section and picking up a paperback or two to explain his presence.) He carried the silk scarf in his backpack like a talisman, but rarely took it out. 

At the end of each day, he returned to the bookshop, emptied out his wallet into the jar on the nightstand in his room[1], and spent the evening hanging out with Crowley and Aziraphale. (Mostly, he listened to them bicker. They always asked about his day, but Warlock was a quiet sort of person, and it was much more fun to watch Crowley’s face as Aziraphale told long-winded, rambling stories about people they had met and places they had been.)

[1] By the end of the first week, there was more than two hundred pounds there. Warlock had a habit of ‘forgetting’ he would likely pay for most things by card, and getting out a large note or two in the morning anyway.

The Wednesday ten days after Warlock arrived in London was a particularly interesting day. He’d gone to see the Globe in the morning (the night before, Crowley had distracted Aziraphale from talking about Hamlet by getting him onto the subject of seventeenth century theatres), then impulsively caught a ferry down the Thames. He didn’t get off until he saw the Cutty Sark, and then he ended up wandering around Greenwich Park for a couple of hours. Seeing the deer, even from a distance, left him longing for the days of Brother Frog and Sister Rabbit, and a few minutes on his phone found him going back upriver to visit a farm at the Surrey Docks. (Crowley, Warlock thought to himself, would have liked the goats. Personally, he was more impressed by the beehives.)

By the time he’d got back to the bookshop, Warlock’s feet were aching, but he was smiling as he came in.[2] “Hello, Aziraphale!” he called out. 

[2] The uncharacteristically lengthy opening hours of the last week and a half had prompted bewilderment in the forum used by regular customers of A.Z. Fell’s to swap strategies for successfully making purchases. Thus far, they had agreed to avoid drawing attention to the change by buying anything, in the hopes that the trend might become a habit. 

“Welcome back, my dear!” Aziraphale exclaimed, beaming. (A customer gave Warlock an envious look.) “How was your day?”

Warlock ducked his head a little, smiling shyly back. “Good, thanks. Is Crowley in?”

“She’s in the back room, or she was,” Aziraphale replied. “Go on and put your things down, you must be tired.”

Warlock nodded, taking note of the pronoun (as far as he could tell, Aziraphale  _ always _ knew which pronoun was appropriate), and headed through to the back room, only to pull up short when he saw Crowley not wearing any sort of dress or skirt or feminine hairdo, but looking the same as she usually did when she was male.

Crowley raised her eyebrows. 

Warlock ducked his head. “Hi, Crowley,” he said quietly. “I’m just going to put my stuff upstairs.”

Crowley didn’t move, her long legs blocking his path. “Sssomething’s bothering you,” she said slowly.

By this point, Warlock’s shoulders were halfway to his ears. “Nothing’s bothering me,” he said hurriedly. “I just didn’t realise you were back here.”

“Aziraphale would have told you,” Crowley pointed out. “No. Something is troubling you, and I intend to fix it.”

“I was just  _ surprised!” _ Warlock blurted out desperately. “Nothing’s  _ wrong! _ I just expected you to look like a woman and you didn’t and I was surprised, okay?”

“Ah.” Crowley stood up, her hands slipping into her pockets[3] and a small, Nanny-like smile crossing her face. “It’s quite alright, my dear. Go put your things upstairs and I’ll explain after dinner.”

[3] Her fingertips slipping into her pockets, anyway. Crowley never kept anything in her pockets, and thus managed to avoid confronting the consequences of a few words to an influential designer half a century ago about form over function. Her jacket had room for her phone, and she didn’t bother carrying anything else.

\-----

All through dinner, Warlock was fidgety and nervous. Even though he knew he shouldn’t be. This was  _ Crowley _ . Nothing bad was going to happen. 

Aziraphale obviously noticed his mood, because he seemed cheerfully determined to distract him with an utterly bizarre story about a salmon, an eagle, and a member of the local nobility in ancient Gaul. 

“I liked the Gauls,” Crowley commented. “They actually managed to get you wearing colour.”

Aziraphale smoothed his hands over his waistcoat, which was hardly colourful, being a soft shade of fawn. “Yes, well, I could hardly present myself as someone of wealth in undyed cloth, could I?” he pointed out fussily. “It was a necessary disguise.”

Crowley rolled her eyes. “I’m not trying to  _ tease _ you about it,” she drawled. “I like you in colour. Remember Chinon, 1429?”[4]

[4] Aziraphale had arrived in Chinon escorting a young woman called Jeanne, and found Crowley already there, working on undermining confidence in the uncrowned heir to the throne. It would have worked out in the end, except for Heaven’s demand for a martyr.

“I needed to blend in at a royal court!” Aziraphale objected, looking subtly pleased. 

“You looked great,” Crowley said firmly. “I haven’t seen you in blue that rich ever since. Go on, show Warlock, or he won’t believe me.” The two exchanged a look, Aziraphale curious, Crowley insistent, and Aziraphale dutifully snapped his fingers.

All of a sudden, Aziraphale’s many-layered outfit was replaced by a coat-like garment, white fur showing around the collar and in a line down the centre where the two flaps crossed over. It was, as promised, a rich blue - not dark, but rich nevertheless - and the fabric looked so smooth and soft Warlock had to sit on his hands so he didn’t reach out to touch it. There was an odd sort of cap on Aziraphale’s head, shaped almost like a beanie if a beanie was made of felt instead of knitted. 

“Wow…” Warlock breathed. Crowley was right, Aziraphale did look good in blue; but more importantly, the coat was obviously  _ foreign _ , and Aziraphale was right at home in it. It was one of those weird bits of evidence that he and Nanny Crowley really were six thousand years old. 

Aziraphale blushed in delight, tugging at the cuffs of his long sleeves so that he could avert his eyes. 

“Come on then, do us a twirl.” Crowley leaned back in her chair, raising an eyebrow in challenge. “Didn’t you have bright yellow hose as part of that outfit?” She smirked. 

“There is nothing  _ sordid _ about the colour of my hose,” Aziraphale said primly, getting up and moving out from behind the table so they could see the full length of the...coat? (Now that he was standing, Warlock could see that the coat had the sort of long, full skirt he was used to seeing on dresses, long enough that only the tips of Aziraphale’s shoes could be seen. And the way it got sort of cinched in by a belt at the waist, and then flared out, it kind of looked more like a dress than a coat.)

As Warlock was figuring this out, Aziraphale had pulled one side of the skirts aside just enough to stick his leg through, showing white…stockings, maybe?...going at least as far up as his knee, while Crowley watched appreciatively. 

“...um, Aziraphale?” Warlock asked hesitantly. “Were you a - a woman in 1429?”

“No,” Aziraphale said, with a confused frown. “What makes you think that, my dear?”

Crowley grinned. “It’s the clothes,” she said. “Fashions change, hellspawn.” Rising, she circled Aziraphale, gesturing as she spoke: “His manly out-thrust chest, mimicking the curve of a breastplate. His waist, fit and trim. Abundant skirts, to show his wealth and power. His strong, well-muscled calves.” She winked at Warlock. “Does he look like a woman to you? When you look  _ properly _ ?” 

Warlock looked, trying to do it the way Nanny Crowley had taught him when he was little. Looking at what was really  _ there _ , instead of just what he expected to see. And what he saw was, well...Brother Aziraphale. Holding himself kind of differently, but not in any way that Warlock thought was particularly  _ feminine _ . “...no, Nanny,” Warlock eventually admitted.

Aziraphale glanced between them, then gave Crowley a Look. “Really, Crowley, if you’re going to use me as an object lesson, you could at least tell me what I’m demonstrating,” he said fussily. (It made Warlock feel a bit better that Aziraphale didn’t know what was going on either.[5]) “What is it, a lesson on historical clothing? You can show that off at least as well as me.”

[5] As Crowley had intended.

“It’s a lesson on gender presentation, and no I can’t,” Crowley replied, crossing her arms. “If Warlock looks properly at me right now, he’ll see a woman no matter what I’m wearing.” (Surprisingly, Warlock found that this was true. Crowley looked the same as ‘he’ usually did, but she  _ did _ seem like a woman somehow. When Warlock looked right.) “You, on the other hand, don’t project gender at all, so you’re better for showing how clothing is arbitrary and cultural.”

Tentatively, Warlock raised his hand.[6] “Um, this is all pretty confusing? Could you maybe just  _ explain _ ? Please?”

[6] This was completely unnecessary, but he was feeling nervous.

Meaningful glances were exchanged, and Aziraphale was, apparently, chosen to explain things. “In the Beginning,” he said, returning his clothes to normal and sitting back down, “the Almighty created Adam and Eve.” (Crowley, in the background, rolled her eyes dramatically.) “They had different bodies, so that they could procreate, but none of us thought of either of them as having any sort of gender. Their human-ness was far more important than their male-ness or female-ness for understanding what  _ kind _ of creature they were, and as for the differences between them, those were thought of as differences between 'how Adam was' and 'how Eve was', rather than differences of  _ type _ ."

“Please tell me you're not planning on narrating six thousand years of human relationships to gender, angel,” Crowley muttered, crossing her arms and leaning against the wall.

Aziraphale turned, and pinned her with a firm look. “Hush,” he said. “ _ Your _ plan only confused him; it's my turn now.”

Crowley sulked, which meant Warlock had to bite his lip so he didn’t laugh, and Aziraphale kept going.

“At any rate, eventually there came to be enough humans that they could no longer know everyone as individuals - instead, they developed an understanding of  _ kinds _ of people. Adults and children, first. Elders. Mothers - by which I mean those who were pregnant or nursing as a specific category within the general group of 'parents'. And, yes, men and women.”

“You make it sound as if everyone was perfectly sensible and reasonable,” Crowley muttered.

Aziraphale rolled his eyes. “Yes, well, the point is that that's how gender  _ began _ , not what it became, any more than cooking remained butchering a carcass to access the best parts.”

Crowley pushed off from the wall and began to pace. She quite liked pacing when she was talking about things, Warlock had figured out. “The thing is, hellspawn,” she said, gesturing expansively, “that there's bodies, which have more or less resemblance to Adam or Eve or both, and there's 'kinds' within a culture - men, women, sekhet, kur-gar-ra, whatever - which dictate what sort of roles you can play in society, and then there's clothes and things that cultures come up with to show different 'kinds', and then there's what's going on inside your head.”

Warlock blinked. “What’s ‘sekhet’? And…’kurgarra’? Did I say that right?”

“Oh, they were genders in Egypt and Sumer...four, five thousand years ago?” Crowley looked over at Aziraphale for confirmation (who nodded), and shrugged. “They don’t translate well because gender’s so cultural. ‘Man’ and ‘woman’ only  _ seem _ like they translate well because of the association with body types.”

Warlock had to think about that for a while. The idea that not only were ‘men’ and ‘women’ not the only options, but that they hadn’t been the only options as long ago as  _ Ancient Egypt _ … “Are you ever a sekhet, Nanny?” he asked. “Or a kurgarra? Or something else?”

Crowley shrugged. “Sort of. It’s complicated. The point is, right now I’ve got a body and clothes that are mostly male according to your culture, but on the inside, I feel closer to female.”

“And you aren’t quiet about projecting it either,” Aziraphale commented, taking a sip of wine. 

"And what's wrong with that?" Crowley countered. "Kept me out of trouble when I was being Ashtoreth, projecting 'woman' so hard that no one noticed the Adam's apple."

Warlock frowned. "So...people treat you like the gender you are for the same reason they don't notice you speeding?" 

“Humans like categorising things,” Crowley said with a shrug. “If your body and your clothes and what you’re doing and how you talk all match the same category, that’s easy. But when some things don’t match, you’ve got to lean in to whatever you want them to notice or they get confused.”

“Just like you did today, my dear,” Aziraphale pointed out, smiling gently at Warlock. “Crowley’s body and clothes and voice said ‘man’ as far as you were concerned, so you needed to be specifically told that she wasn’t one. If she’d had a skirt, or lipstick, or more of a bust, it wouldn’t have confused you as much, because those things all say ‘woman’ at the moment.”

Warlock bit his lip as he tried to think that through, but frankly, all this was starting to give him a headache. “...can I think about this tomorrow?” he asked plaintively. It was a lot to take in, all these other genders, and the presentation stuff, and how Crowley apparently projected her gender so people worked it out somehow, and the way humans thought about it all, and when Warlock contemplated applying all that to  _ himself _ , it made his head swim.

Aziraphale and Crowley exchanged glances, and Nanny sat back down, reaching out to squeeze his hand. “Of course you can, my dear,” she murmured. “Think about it as long as you like.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, for those who were wondering, the Jeanne that Aziraphale escorted to Chinon in 1429 was Joan of Arc. For a glimpse at some clothing of the time, try https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Vigiles_du_roi_Charles_VII#/media/File:Vigiles_misc_03.jpg
> 
> Sekhet and kur.gar.ra both come from a Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender#History
> 
> Thanks for waiting so patiently for this chapter - it got stuck, and I'm still not completely sure of it, but at least it exists now.


	4. Chapter 4

There was only one person, back in the US, that Warlock had any interest in keeping in touch with: Prudence Staples, who had gone to the girls’ boarding school that sometimes paired up with his for dances and things. (Most people called her Prue, but she called him Warlock, so he called her Prudence.) She was sensible, and interesting, and odd, and she knew all about odd families. _ Her _ family were mostly witches - not professionally, her mum was a research librarian - and she had a weird sort of knack for guessing what was going to happen. It was Prudence who had suggested he look through his mum's filing cabinet, and when he'd told her what he'd found, she'd given him strict instructions to report back.

He’d sent her a quick message after he arrived, but he hadn’t told her much detail, and, well...it would be nice to talk to someone mostly normal (or human, at least) about all this.

_ Hi Prudence - WD _

**Warlock! How are you? - PS**

_ Sorry - WD _

_ There’s been a lot going on - WD _

**You’re okay, though? - PS**

_ Yeah. Nanny and Brother Francis are great, it’s just...a lot to process - WD _

_ You know how you said Nanny was probably a witch? - WD _

**Yeah? - PS**

**Was I right? - PS**

_ Sort of. It’s complicated - WD _

_ It turns out she and Brother Francis raised me because of a...prophecy, kind of. But they got it wrong - WD _

_ I was the wrong kid - WD _

**Prophecies are easy to misinterpret like that - PS**

**Are you okay? - PS**

_ Yeah. It was kind of a shock when they told me, but they’ve still been really nice, so, y’know... not JUST the prophecy, at least - WD _

**Good - PS**

[...] _ You know how I said they were kind of different from how I remembered? - WD _

**Yeah? - PS**

_ Nanny’s a man now. Mostly. Sometimes she isn’t - WD _

**Huh. - PS**

**What’s that like? - PS**

_ I dunno. Like, she looks really different - WD _

_ And she acts kind of different? - WD _

_ But she’s still Nanny, even when she’s a he - WD _

**She still uses she/her pronouns? - PS**

**Or are you just forgetting to use the proper ones? You know that’s important, right? You’ve got to use the right name and pronouns for people - PS**

_ She said it’s fine for me to use whatever. And to call her Nanny if I want, even though most people don’t call her that - WD _

**What should I call her, do you think? - PS**

_ Brother Francis calls her Crowley - WD _

_ He’s got a different name too, actually - WD _

**Yeah? - PS**

_ Yeah. Aziraphale - WD _

**Wow. That’s even weirder than OUR names - PS**

**Is he from a religious family or something? - PS**

_ Or something - WD _

[...]_ Hey, Prudence? - WD _

**Yeah? - PS**

_ Nanny says that gender is made up, and it’s something you are in your head, and it doesn’t have to have anything to do with your body or your clothes or your job or your hobbies or anything - WD _

_ That’s...weird, right? - WD _

[...] **I think it makes sense - PS**

**Like, a hundred years ago, women didn’t wear pants or run companies or keep working after they got married. Doing those things was manly. But now it can be womanly too, right? - PS**

**So if that much can change, I bet **other things can change too - PS****

_ ...I dunno if my father would think those things are womanly - WD _

**Yeah, but your dad’s a misogynistic dickhead - PS**

**Maybe Crowley’s just like...galaxy brain on all this stuff - PS**

_ Ha - WD _

_ Thanks - WD _

[...] _ It’s weird, though. Like, women can do things only men could do in the past. But men wearing skirts is still weird - WD _

**Yeah, but maybe that’s because of sexism too - PS**

**Like, if women want to be like men, that’s okay, because men are ‘better’. But if it goes the other way then that’s weird - PS**

**I think it’s stupid. Men should be able to wear skirts if they want. Dresses **are cooler in summer anyway - PS****

_ Yeah? You don’t think it would look weird with hairy legs and stuff? - WD _

**Half my cousins don’t shave their legs, you know. One of them told me that the idea of shaving your armpits was invented to sell more razors - PS**

_ ...that sounds depressingly plausible - WD _

_ And now I’m feeling self-conscious about my armpits - WD _

**Does Crowley shave her armpits? - PS**

_ Ew! I don’t wanna think about Nanny’s armpits! Gross, Prudence - WD _

**It was a simple question - PS**

_ It was a GROSS question - WD _

_ And she wears long sleeves all the time, you can’t tell - WD _

**I bet she wouldn’t - PS**

**She sounds too cool to shave her armpits just because society says you should - PS**

_ Well you are never ever going to find out, because I am never ever going to ask - WD _

**Spoilsport - PS**

_ Weirdo - WD _

**I take pride in my weirdness, thank you very much - PS**

_ So you’re gonna get a t-shirt saying ‘I think about strangers’ armpits’? - WD _

***eyeroll* - PS**

**So did they like their presents? - PS**

_ Yeah - WD _

_ Thanks for the advice on the one for Aziraphale - WD _

_ You should see his bookshop - he loaned me a SEVENTEENTH CENTURY book of Latin poetry - WD _

**Holy shit - PS**

**That is seriously impressive - PS**

_ I know, right? - WD _

_ No wonder he doesn’t like people touching stuff - WD _

**Yet he loaned a book to YOU, whose favourite place to read is up a tree? - PS**

_ I’m special - WD _

_ And I’d never take THIS book up a tree - WD _

**Sure you wouldn’t - PS**

_ So enough about me - WD _

_ How have you been? - WD _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What do you think of Prudence?
> 
> Also, I need ideas for what Warlock should do next. I don't want to push him too fast, but also I don't know how fast that is or what the obvious things are to explore or...anything. I have a gender, but it's not a big part of my identity, so this whole thing is kind of outside my experience.


	5. The Future

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crowley raises the question of what Warlock is going to do next

The summer passed. 

In the evenings, Warlock worked his way through the Catullus poems Aziraphale had loaned him, and in the afternoons he started visiting libraries to read forums and blogs and articles about...everything. The jar on his bedside table filled up with cash, and Crowley took him to set up a bank account to deposit it in. Prudence sent him [youtube videos of something], and he started trying on clothes from the thrift stores that he'd only been able to look at before. He let his hair grow out, and Aziraphale showed him how to file and buff his nails. He went to plays and musicals and talks and walking tours, and tried out different ways of wearing the scarf Crowley had given him. One morning he shyly asked Aziraphale to call him 'they' instead of 'he', and even if it didn't fit entirely right, Aziraphale complied so unhesitatingly that he found himself asking again at least once a week, just to hear how easily Aziraphale and Crowley switched back and forth. 

Near the end of September, Crowley took him for a drive - a long one, the sort of drive that involved going horribly fast on winding country B roads while Queen blasted in the background. Crowley’s driving was still slightly terrifying, but Warlock had gotten mostly used to it by now, and he trusted her not to hit anything. 

“So, Warlock,” Crowley said, somewhere in Gloucestershire. “Have you had any thoughts about what you’re going to do next?”

Warlock looked at him suspiciously through his fringe. “What do you mean?”

Crowley shrugged. “Well, you’re welcome to stay at the bookshop as long as you want, but you’ve only got so much life ahead of you,” he pointed out. “So you might want to start thinking about how you want to spend it.”

It was an intimidating question, and Warlock hunched his shoulders as he thought about it. “What do you think I should do?” he asked.

“Hoping I’ll tell you so you don’t have to make up your mind?” Crowley looked over at him and raised her eyebrows. “I’m not in the business of telling people what to do, hellspawn.”

“...I don’t  _ know _ ,” Warlock mumbled, looking away. “All I know is I don’t want to do what I’m  _ supposed _ to do.” He’d been avoiding the question of what was going to happen after that summer - there were just too  _ many _ choices. How the hell was he supposed to pick something?

“Why don’t you tell me about that, then?”

\-----

A few days later, Aziraphale came to dinner looking  _ very _ smug, and announced, “I was chatting today to Florence Thistlethwaite, a contact of mine at the Bodleian, and she told me that her colleague at the Ashmolean heard from a friend of his at the university’s natural history museum that their zoology section needs a temporary collections assistant.” He sat back in his chair, beaming at Warlock. “What do you think, my dear? Would you like to try it?”

Warlock blinked as he tried to work out the ‘it’ he was being asked about. “Being a collections assistant at a museum?” he asked hesitantly. “Don’t you need, like...training for that?” And experience? Something more on a resume than ‘finished high school with decent marks’?

“Nah, you’ll be fine,” Crowley reassured him, waving a hand. “They just need someone to photograph things and transcribe labels and keep an eye on the beetles. You can learn on the job.”

Warlock looked between the two of them suspiciously.

“You don’t have to, of course,” Aziraphale hurried to reassure him. “Of course you can stay here as long as you like, and if working in a museum doesn’t appeal we can help you find something else, but it seemed like it might be a good fit - you could get to know the university without having to actually apply, and you always did like natural history.”

Crowley rolled his eyes. “He liked bugs and guts, angel, like a good little hellspawn.”

“If it was only insects and entrails that caught his attention, my dear, I wouldn’t have spent so long explaining bird migration patterns,” Aziraphale said primly.

“Um,” Warlock said, interrupting their incipient bickering, “if I...if I worked at a museum in Oxford, I couldn’t stay here, could I?” The job sounded...kind of cool, maybe. But he liked being here.

Aziraphale folded his hands in his lap and smiled sadly at him. “It’s a bit far for a commute,” he admitted softly. “Not too far to come home on the weeke- I mean, to come visit the shop,” he corrected himself hastily, his back stiff. “You’re always welcome to visit, that’s what I meant.”

It was reassuring, honestly, that Aziraphale wasn’t sure about offering. It made Warlock feel more sure about saying, “I’ll come home. If I get it, I mean.”

Crowley grinned. “Oh, you will.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the record, chances of getting a museum job without any prior experience as a volunteer is............low. Let's just call it ineffable.
> 
> At this point, I'm going to wrap up this work, and the series. I had vague plans for another FIVE parts, but I don't think that's going to happen, so I'm going to post the not-fic outlines for you as an additional work in the series so you all can get a) closure and b) ideeeaas
> 
> I hope you've all enjoyed!


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